Back of Beyond: by George Ellison and Janet McCue

In December 1903, Horace Kephart resigned – under duress - his position at the Saint Louis Mercantile Library.  Soon thereafter, his wife, Laura, and their six children - left without any financial support - moved to Ithaca, New York, to live with her parents. Then Kephart left for Dayton, Ohio, where his parents lived.  From there he traveled by himself to Dillsboro, North Carolina, in August of 1904. He lived the rest of his life in North Carolina’s Great Smoky Mountains. In the thirteen years he had served as a librarian in St. Louis, he had taken frequent camping trips and written on the subject. In the Smokies, he continued writing on the subject in periodicals, and published Camping and Woodcraft, the definitive book on the subject at the time, in 1906. Camp Cookery followed in 1910 and Sporting Firearms in 1912. In 1913 he published Our Southern Highlanders, a distinctively male report on the life of mountain people that complemented Emma Bell Miles’ The Spirit of the Mountains